8/17/2009 @ 7:00PM

'Mad Men' Scores Where It Counts

Flush with 16 Emmy nominations and glowing reviews, Mad Men‘s season premiere delivered the only thing the show has been lacking: viewers.

The heavily marketed AMC series about a 1960s advertising firm launched its third season on Sunday to a record audience of 2.8 million live viewers. While that’s a hefty lift–33% to be exact–from last season’s premiere, it remains a Nielsen number that few established original series cable networks would get excited about. By comparison,
Time Warner
-owned TNT’s hit series The Closer averages some 7 million viewers, while
General Electric
-owned USA’s Burn Notice and Time Warner-owned HBO’s True Blood garner about 6 million and 4 million viewers, respectively.

But what the audience for the Jon Hamm star vehicle still lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. In its first two seasons, half of Mad Men‘s adult viewers (25 to 54 years old) had household incomes over $100,000, making it the most upscale audience on cable TV–a point that is not lost on advertisers. Among them: luxury automaker BMW, which once again sponsored the show’s season premiere.

According to estimates by research firm SNL Kagan, the
Cablevision
-owned network took in about $208 million in advertising revenue last year, up one-third from its haul in 2006, also known as the pre-Mad Men era. (Total ad revenue for 2009 is expected to decline care of the ailing economy.)

What’s more, the heavily hyped series from The Sopranos writer-producer Matthew Weiner, which HBO, Showtime and others famously passed on, has redefined its formerly moribund host network. Once just another movie channel, AMC is now the buzz-worthy home of critically acclaimed and Emmy-winning fare like Mad Men, follow-up Breaking Bad and the upcoming mini-series remake of The Prisoner. (Though AMC’s movies fail to generate the same level of awards or press, they remain an important revenue stream for the network.)

To be sure, AMC’s Mad Men-led leap into original dramas hasn’t come cheap. AMC’s programming expenses, which include its series–an episode of Mad Men or Breaking Bad reportedly costs about $2 million to make–as well as the films it licenses, will likely total $157 million in 2009, a 27% increase from 2006, reports Kagan.

But the increasingly popular programming decision seems to be paying off: Though it’s difficult to directly correlate a specific show’s results with its network’s financial performance, Kagan estimates that AMC will report operating revenue of $439 million this year, up 19% from three years ago, while cash flow will come in at $240 million this year, up 14% over the same period.